Sad Days, Indeed
by tFantasyFan
Summary: Michelangelo wakes up sparkling. It all kind of goes downhill from there.


_Questioning my logic in this will only lead to your inevitable destruction._

_Okay, so yeah, disclaiming right here, lookit that, all fancy and non-ownership, non-profit, all that jazz I've had sugar and caffeine today YAY.

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Michelangelo woke up one morning and discovered that he was, in fact, much shinier than usual. Glittering, even. Upon closer investigation, he discovered that it was less shiny glitter and more...feminine sparkles. Large ones. Large, yellow, twinkly-sounding _fucking_ _sparkles _that drifted about his body at random and occasionally got sucked into his retinas- which was not only painful as all get-out, but which also led him to view his bedroom as a mystical forest of unicorns, faeries and inhabitable mushrooms. When he attempted to enter one of the aforementioned mushrooms, he merely walked into what felt suspiciously like a brick wall. His vaguely manly grunt of pain came out as a high-pitched whimper, which led to a minute of crying despite the fact that he'd taken two simultaneously broken legs with a rather well-controlled reaction in the past.

He cried some more in grief over his lost dignity. The unicorns laughed and the faeries flipped him the bird.

All of which was quite a bit to take in so early in the morning, and understandably so. A healthy dosage of denial convinced him that he was clearly dreaming, so he very patiently sat back down to wait it out. After another ten minutes or so, the mystical forest faded, his pile of rose petals became a bed once more, his eyes stopped burning, and the sparkles were waiting for him again. Frowning, he flicked at one of them. It separated into seven smaller sparkles and tinkled.

Mikey stared at them and they tinkled again.

"What the he-nn-_heck?_" He blinked and felt his neck. No, there didn't seem to be anything in particular wrong with it- apart from the fact that his own vocal chords wouldn't obey his commands. Ever determined, he tried again. "He-_eck. _D-d-_darn._"

Oh. Oh, no. This was just getting disturbing.

"Shi-agh! _Shoot!_" Wide eyes turned to his new-found accessories and narrowed. "You as-_apes _better cut this out now. I'm serious!"

They didn't respond and after a second he realized what he'd said. "Oh, for the love of fu-_rick!_"

Right. Dreams were all fine and good but when he couldn't even swear like a sailor in the comfort of his own room, it was time to get back to the real world. With a smug smirk at the nearest abomination, he gave the skin between his thumb and forefinger a merciless pinch.

Nothing happened. After many more unsuccessful attempts, he dropped his arms to his sides silently. Not working. Okay. And touching _them_ didn't help anything. A couple drifted a little too close to his face for his liking and he shooed them away like troublesome flies. No, trippy visions weren't going to help anything either. So it...wasn't a dream?

Seriously?

Michelangelo considered taking a wise and reasonable course of action- and then decided against it and ran out of his bedroom screaming for help.

The fact that this scream came out as high-pitched and pathetic as a brokenhearted preteen girl didn't help matters. In fact, it made him run in frantic circles around the couch, babbling incoherently while his brothers attempted to intervene. After so many of said attempts failed to shut him up and sit him down, Raph grew frustrated and clotheslined him. Everybody was torn between reprimanding him and praising him for a job well done; so much so that they settled for shrugging it off rather than acknowledging it at all.

"You're welcome," he stated haughtily.

They shrugged that off, too. Turning his attention to the predominant issue at hand, Donatello cocked his head to one side as he regarded his sibling. "Would you care to explain why you've been running around like a- like a-" Blink. Squint. "Mikey, are you _sparkling?_"

Having been calmed down slightly by his fall to the floor, Michelangelo nodded. "Yes. Yes I am."

Raphael cautiously waved off a few that had sprung into being upon his brother's descent and, upon determining that they wouldn't cause much harm, burst out laughing. It continued in the background for many minutes.

"_He's- he- ahahaha-"_

Donatello ignored it and nodded. "I see."

"So...solution?"

"Let me think." He sat up and waited for a minute while Don stared at him.

And stared. And stared some more. It was annoying.

"Uh, Don?" Leo asked, waving a hand in front of his brother's face. "You still in there?"

"_-oh god I think I'm gonna puke-"_

"Shut up, Raph! You're distracting Donnie from his thinking!" Leo snapped, crossing his arms.

At which point said turtle broke out of his pensive state. Michelangelo greeted him with the most blatantly hopeful face he could muster up.

"So what's the verdict?" Leonardo inquired, now somewhat enthralled by the yellow shapes and the fact that his brother's eyes were about three times larger than normal.

Donatello's stance was one of the utmost gravity- his face was set in an expression of determination and grim realization. He opened his mouth to speak and even the hysterically amused Raph was silent in anticipation.

"He's _adorable._"

"This is true, my sons," came the voice of their father-slash-sensei. All four teenagers looked to him, respectfully silent. "This...sparkling, as you say, is no doubt a physical personification of Michelangelo's pure, innocent, childish soul. With your conveniently forgotten abilities to manipulate chi, I had suspected such a thing would happen in a matter of time. Though I did not even consider mentioning it to forewarn you of the possibility."

And, well, when had he ever?

The ninja master looked over them all as seriously as he had ever done. "From this day forth, you are all challenged with protecting your brother's innocent soul, no matter what the cost, because his feminine appearance and feeble strength are the sunshine of our darkest days below the surface, and he is incapable of taking care of himself."

And with that, he headed into the dojo.

Leo and Don nodded grimly, swearing an oath in their hearts, clearly inspired. Michelangelo slapped his hand to his forehead. Raphael exploded into laughter yet again, apparently still getting over the initial appearance of such a phenomenon.

Donnie knelt as gracefully as a five-foot-tall, bipedal ninja turtle could, offering a hand to his little brother in order to help him to his feet. Mikey smacked it away irritably- or rather, he attempted to do so, only to fail and effectively paw at it like a kitten.

"It's okay, Mike, everybody needs help sometimes," his brother informed him with a condescending smile. Not that he intended it to be condescending.

"And because you fell, I'll make sure to make training as easy as possible for you today," Leonardo added decidedly.

This...was not amusing him in the slightest. It was one thing to fake sick- not very well, mind you- to get out of training on a normal day. But to get it easy because he fell once? Seriously? When yesterday they would have told him to get over it and stop whining? And why, _why was Raph still laughing? _Michelangelo pushed himself to his feet and glared at his brother with all the power he could muster.

"Stop laughing! Stop laughing right _now_!" He demanded, unable to prevent a childish foot-stomp in emphasis. When this failed to have an effect, he marched up and delivered what was meant to be a solid punch in the jaw- that came out as a slightly less than sharp slap.

Agh, he couldn't even punch a guy anymore! If it was really a chi thing causing this, then his soul was decidedly made of epic fail. Wide-eyed bunnies, candy and epic fail.

Well, it had at least shut Raph up, which was a good thing: right?

No. Turned out it wasn't.

"You slapped me..." His brother murmured, gazing at him with sudden...was that _admiration? _

"Mike..." There was a dramatic pause and Raphael fell to one knee to better express his upcoming proclamation. "You had the guts to stand up to me. I must now take you under my wing, treat you differently than I treat anybody else, and protect you from all bad things that will ever happen in the rest of all eternity. Because you are my little brother and you got in my face."

"...Leo does that all the time, you know. And you usually end up trying to beat him up."

"Yeah, but he's strong enough to handle it. Because you're so feeble, I can never consider hurting you again, ever."

Mikey contemplated crying as he was quite literally whisked into the dojo by his brothers. They set him down outside the doors and scattered mysteriously-obtained rose petals at his feet before he entered. Master Splinter smiled warmly at him and complimented him on how his mask made his eyes look stunning.

Nobody would spar with him because they didn't want to hurt him.

Future enemies- that is, if he could manage a way to get within fifty _feet_ of a dangerous presence- took one look at him and laughed themselves into unconsciousness.

Women whose rescues he was present for drew artistic renderings of him in kimonos, surrounded by flowers or blushing like a schoolgirl; the sparkles were almost always present. Some of them, through a form of psychic ability that left him freaked out, wrote mediocre fictional stories about him sobbing like a baby in the face of violence, crawling into bed with others because of nightmares that weren't all that frightening in reality and with a vocabulary of about four words interspersed with the occasional hideous pun. He always, _always _bottomed during sex and was never able to swear out loud again.

Just when he thought that things couldn't get any worse, a morning dawned that saw the same yellow menaces plaguing Raphael. With their magical uke-powers, both turtles became pregnant and gave birth to at least three ass-babies at once. Michelangelo lamented their fates and wondered how long it would be before Leo and/or Don fell victim as well.

The world was surely ending, and it was going to look shiny as fuck.


End file.
